Life of a Developer

>One of the better parts of being a member of the QtCentre administration team is that you get the opportunity to run the annual programming contest. In the first stage, we discussed how to pitch it this year. Last year we tried to divide the entries between developer apps, end user apps, libs, etc. This year we ‘re trying something different. The categories this year are: collaboration, education, project management, automation, demo, plasmoid and newcomer. If you are curious about the details, look no futher than here. I will discuss our thoughts when choosing these categories later on.

In the previous days we reached the next stage of the preparations. I got to talk to lots of interesting sponsors and partners. The nice thing to notice the all the positive feedback that we got. This year, the sponsors making the contest possible are: Klarälvdalens Datakonsult AB, Integrated Computer Solutions Inc., Trolltech ASA, BitRock, Thorsen Consulting, Apress and basysKom. (Yes Apress are donating some copies of my book, the Foundations of Qt Development).

Now, I’m eager for one of the best stages of helping out with the contest – seeing the contestants and trying them out.

>Yes – I do suck at image editing – but Kubica did it – POLE!

>Earlier this week, SpeedCrunch 0.10 was released. Helder and all the other contributors have made a great job to make a good application even better. There are lots of new features, but some of my favorites are:

– The maths book, look up any formula and click it. Viola! It appears in your expression entry field.
– Automatic generation of a high contrast palette (this was alot of work for Helder). And it works like a charm.
– A reorganized, fresher looking user interface.

My humble contributions are the Swedish translation and a Windows installer. SC is available on all Qt-supported platforms, so there is no excuse for not using it. In fact, it is a really good example of a Qt project that is fully portable between all the supported platforms being built with CMake.

>I have not been blogging the last couple of weeks, so here is a condensed report of what I’ve been up to.

• Qtopia presentation at IT Universitetet, Gothenburg. Note to self, make sure to have water the first hour. Speaking for two hours, only sipping water the second half leaves you with a soar throat.
• Work, work, work – I’ve been working like a mad man the last weeks. One week in Lapland doing winter testing for an automotive customer (great fun, but still quite a few days away from home).
• Qt Quarterly dinner – a nice little event in Oslo. A rather loud restaurant, so it was hard to maintain a conversation, but still nice.
• Carpenting – the upper floor is beginning to look ready-ish. Will try to get the wallpapers up this weekend. Then it is just the floor, doors and details left.
• Driving – got my new car last week, a BMW 520d. It drives like a dream :-)

Well, now I need to work some more. Do not forget to watch the F1 next weekend. If BMW wins it must be due to my generous contribution. I hope that all the profit from my purchase is transferred directly to Dr. Thiessen’s department.

>The news has mentioned file sharing more and more. The Pirate Bay has ended up in court, the Danes are blocking TPB and in GB, the discussing seems to concern shutting out customers (Swedish link).

Now, I have two questions:

#1 Will I be shut out for sharing my latest Kubuntu torrent?
#2 How do you discriminate between TPB and Google? Both allow you to search for copyrighted material.

Let me continue by saying that I’m not an information-wants-to-be-free-I-grab-what-I-can kind of guy. However, I feel that the current problem is a legal system and a market that are seriously out of synch with reality. Allowing this to ruin peoples lives and private economy during a transition period (yes – reality always catches up) is a Bad Thing.

So, what are the alternatives:

Watermarking (and prohibited/limited re-distribution)
Free (as in libre) software with paid services
Free (as in free beer) software with paid services
Free music with more frequent (paid) public performances
Paid software with hardware keys

I’m sure that there are more alternatives here. I will be interesting to see which is choosen as standard (hopefully now suing your customers…)

>

We’re showing Badger at the Elektronik-EP fair for three days. You can find our booth here, and print a free ticket here.

And, by the way, congratulations to Nokia and Trolltech!

>Anyone in western Sweden looking for a nice car. Look no further than this lovely vehicle! I can throw in a copy of Foundations of Qt Development to sweeten the deal :-)

Yes – I’m getting a new car. The old one has been used as a commuting car, so just “kind” kilometres. The reason I’m changing is because the Passat is a leasing car. I’m very happy with it still. Get it while its hot! :-)

>The Qtopia+BADGE study has really reached its end. It has been really fun working with low-level Qtopia development for a few weeks. I’ve not done all this alone, both Bitsim Stockholm and Gothenburg have been involved. Lot’s of colleagues have been forced to put up with my Qtopia ramblings (yes, I’m obsessed) and I’ve had the opportunity to have a look at some really interesting parts of Qtopia.

The next step here is creating a product, polishing the driver. Something that I’ve learned from working with software is that the 80-20 rule aught to be called the 90-10 rule. Since the work until now was the first 90%, we’ve probably spent 10% of the time – meaning lots of more Qtopia work for me :-)

For those of you who are curios, you can find BADGE information here. If you happen to be in the vicinity of Gothenburg or Stockholm, do pop-by and I’ll show you a demo. You can reach me at e8johan -at- gmail -dot- com.

>Today is ugly-hack day. BADGE has a nice feature that has no real counter-part in the Qtopia API. This means that I have to dynamically cast the painter engine for a given widget and provide some additional methods in the BADGE version.

The feature of the day is to integrate a live video stream with the Qtopia interface. BADGE supports video through “blue screening”. This means that a given colour is replaced by the video stream. The video itself can be translated and scaled, making it possible to have BADGE put video in a moveable, resizable window – but let’s not get carried away.

Using just a few lines of code, we can get a video stream into the user interface. All is handled by the BADGE hardware – remember that our CPU is running at 180 MHz and uses a 60 MHz bus to access the BADGE GPU so we cannot handle it through it. The video below shows the video running together with Qwt. The video quality isn’t really HDTV – I only had a mobile phone to film with, but it shows the principle.

So, it seems that it is fully possible to accelerate Qtopia using BADGE. Actually, it was easier than I first expected. However, it is far from possible to accelerate everything – at least with a reasonable effort. IMHO it seems more efficient (man-hour-wise) to provide a clean acceleration driver and write one’s applications with care than to spend man-years creating an overly complex driver. Having discussed this work with Trolltech, it seems that Qtopia 4.4 will have even more accelerateable features – I’m looking forward to it :-)

>Note to self…
Doors: Addera vit, 82cm
Handles: Hoppe Verona